Contents

Complaints procedure

Complain to Monitor about NHS services, or procurement, patient choice and competition in the NHS, blow the whistle, or complain about Monitor.

The NHS complaints procedure

There is an NHS complaints procedure to help you resolve your individual complaint, which we have no role in. While we use information from complaints in a number of ways in our regulatory work, our duties as a regulator do not include resolving individual complaints for patients.

To resolve your individual complaint about services provided by an NHS organisation, you should complain:

Video: How to make a complaint about an NHS healthcare service

How we will use information from your complaint

We listen to all the complaints we receive about NHS healthcare and record the information you give us. Within 10 working days, we will let you know how we plan to use that information as part of our work as a regulator.

There are 3 key areas where we can use the information you share with us:

Governance of foundation trusts

Every NHS foundation trust has a licence to operate which requires them to be well run by their board of directors. So if you make a complaint to us about an NHS foundation trust we will consider whether it could signal underlying problems with how the trust is run.

Integrated care in the NHS

The integrated care licence condition is designed to prevent NHS providers from standing in the way of care being delivered in an integrated way.

You can contact Monitor to raise your concerns if you think that a licensed healthcare provider may have breached or is going to breach the integrated care condition of the NHS provider licence. Our role is not to resolve concerns about an individual’s care package, for example, but to look at the more general behaviour of the provider.

Procurement, patient choice or competition in the NHS

Part of Monitor’s role is to make sure that procurement, patient choice and competition operate in the best interests of patients and to step in if anti-competitive behaviour by NHS commissioners or providers goes against patients’ interests. You can find more information about this here.

If you have a query about NHS procurement, patient choice or competition, Monitor is happy to speak to you informally or formally. Please call to discuss your situation and available options.

Examples of advice we have given recently are:

a patient contacted us because he did not feel he was being treated quickly enough, and we were able to advise him of the choices available to him to access quicker treatment

a commissioner contacted us to discuss their plans for a prime contractor and we advised them how the rules applied to those plans

a provider contacted us with concerns about a commissioner’s conduct and we advised them about the rules relating to conflicts of interests

Blow the whistle

If you work in the NHS or any organisation relevant to Monitor’s role and have serious concerns that you can’t raise within your organisation, you can contact Monitor as a whistleblower.

For example, you may have information about your employer committing a crime or putting someone’s safety at risk.

Similar to complaints, we will consider whether the concerns you are raising impact on the governance of a foundation trust, integrated care or procurement, patient choice and competition in the NHS.